A child who does not play is not a child, but the man who does not play has lost forever the child who lived in him.  ~Pablo Neruda

Man is most nearly himself when he achieves the seriousness of a child at play.  ~Heraclitus

In every real man a child is hidden that wants to play.  ~Friedrich Nietzsche

If you want to be creative, stay in part a child, with the creativity and invention that characterizes children before they are deformed by adult society.  ~Jean Piaget

O men, grown sick with toil and care,
Leave for awhile the crowded mart;
O women, sinking with despair,
Weary of limb and faint of heart,
Forget your years to-day and come
As children back to childhood’s house.
~Phoebe CaryQSO, Thanksgiving Day

Each man carries within him the soul of a poet who died young.  ~Sainte-Beuve, Portraits littéraires, 1862LCD

The opposite of play is not work.  It’s depression.  ~Brian Sutton-Smith (play theorist, b.1924)

Grown-ups love figures.  When you tell them that you have made a new friend, they never ask you any questions about essential matters.  They never say to you, "What does his voice sound like?  What games does he love best?  Does he collect butterflies?" Instead, they demand:  "How old is he?  How many brothers has he?  How much does he weigh?  How much money does his father make?"  Only from these figures do they think they have learned anything about him.  ~Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince, 1943, translated from FrenchNA

Everybody’s 12 years old in an apple orchard.  ~Rachael Ray, Rachael Ray Show, while making autumn stew, original airdate 11 October 2007TPV

The great man is he who does not lose his child’s-heart.  ~Mencius, Book IVch2, FW

Creativity represents a miraculous coming together of the uninhibited energy of the child with its apparent opposite and enemy, the sense of order imposed on the disciplined adult intelligence.  ~Norman Podhoretz

There are children playing in the streets who could solve some of my top problems in physics, because they have modes of sensory perception that I lost long ago.  ~J. Robert Oppenheimer

I want to giggle myself to sleep each night and jump on the fluffy, comforting pillows of faith.  ~Terri Guillemets

One must ask children and birds how cherries and strawberries taste.  ~Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, quoted in Johann Peter Eckermann, Gespräche mit Goethe; RC; SD; NEMYL

I wish I didn’t know now what I didn’t know then.  ~Bob Seger, "Against the Wind"

He who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe is as good as dead; his eyes are closed.  ~Albert EinsteinGCLE

The playing adult steps sideward into another reality; the playing child advances forward to new stages of mastery.  ~Erik H. Erikson

Children ask better questions than adults.  "May I have a cookie?" "Why is the sky blue?" and "What does a cow say?" are far more likely to elicit a cheerful response than "Where’s your manuscript?" Why haven’t you called?" and "Who’s your lawyer?"  ~Fran Lebowitz

So, like a forgotten fire, a childhood can always flare up again within us.  ~Gaston Bachelard

To speak truly, few adult persons can see nature.  Most persons do not see the sun.  At least they have a very superficial seeing.  The sun illuminates only the eye of the man, but shines into the eye and heart of the child.  The lover of nature is he whose inward and outward senses are still truly adjusted to each other; who has retained the spirit of infancy even into the era of manhood.  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson

Think what a better world it would be if we all – the whole world – had cookies and milk about three o?clock every afternoon and then lay down with our blankies for a nap.  ~Robert Fulghum, All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten, commonly misattributed to Barbara Jordan because she quoted Fulghum in a commencement address

A child’s world is fresh and new and beautiful, full of wonder and excitement.  It is our misfortune that for most of us that clear-eyed vision, that true instinct for what is beautiful and awe-inspiring, is dimmed and even lost before we reach adulthood.  ~Rachel Carson

When childhood dies, its corpses are called adults and they enter society, one of the politer names of hell.  That is why we dread children, even if we love them, they show us the state of our decay.  ~Brian Aldiss

Maybe we should develop a Crayola bomb as our next secret weapon.  A happiness weapon.  A beauty bomb.  And every time a crisis developed, we would launch one.  It would explode high in the air – explode softly – and send thousands, millions, of little parachutes into the air.  Floating down to earth – boxes of Crayolas.  And we wouldn’t go cheap, either – not little boxes of eight.  Boxes of sixty-four, with the sharpener built right in.  With silver and gold and copper, magenta and peach and lime, amber and umber and all the rest.  And people would smile and get a little funny look on their faces and cover the world with imagination.  ~Robert Fulghum

Adults are obsolete children.  ~Dr. Seuss

The end of childhood is when things cease to astonish us.  When the world seems familiar, when one has got used to existence, one has become an adult.  ~Eugene IonescoCD